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WHAT can a medical drama and a cop show have in common? When
it's the newish House and the long-running CSI,
quite a lot.

Viewers of House will be aware that one of Dr House's
many idiosyncrasies is his firm belief that patients cannot be
trusted not to lie about their condition.

It is the diagnostic genius of the physician, employing all the
technology medical science can muster, that attains the truth, more
often than not in spite of, rather than with the help of, any
information the patient might have to contribute.

This supreme confidence in what laboratory processes can reveal,
fuelled by a contemptuous dismissal of the reliability of human
testimony, is shared by Gil Grissom, the team supervisor for the
Las Vegas Crime Scene Investigation Unit in CSI:
"Concentrate on what cannot lie: the evidence."

What a paranoid pair! But House and Grissom, or rather
the series in which these characters appear, seem to fit the mood
of a paranoid age.

To trace all this angst solely to the politics of America,
post-9/11, would be to succumb to the paranoia, as well being more
than a little sloppy with dates: the pilot for CSI was
seen in the US in 1999, and the series began screening regularly
the year after.

But the early reactions to it are interesting to recall: nervous
network executives, and not a few critics, thought that audiences
would find the relentless emphasis on police procedure
mind-numbingly confusing.

Now, however, the assumption appears to be that they will find
it reassuring. The subtext of CSI and its spin-offs and
imitators is: see, we have the knowledge; the system works, and you
can feel safe because the bad guys cannot get past us.

The "police procedural" sub-genre may not owe its existence to
the post- 9/11 age of anxiety but its proliferation can plausibly
be attributed to it. CSI has spawned CSI: Miami
and CSI: New York, and Law & Order, that
other long-running police procedural, has also generated multiple
spin-offs.

Apart from the parent series, the world's television audiences
have also endured Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, Law
& Order: Criminal Intent and Law & Order: Trial by
Jury.

The various Law & Order spin-offs do not always
approximate closely to the ideal type commended in Grissom's
prescription to "concentrate on what cannot lie".

If the subject matter happens to be the intentions formed in a
criminal mind, or the difficulties faced by prosecutors trying to
convince a jury, then that troublesome thing, human testimony, can
hardly be dispensed with.

But in all these series, the emphasis is on technique, on what
investigators and prosecutors do. Procedure is everything.

Fortunately, just as that other, less paranoid America we
remember from pre-9/11 times has not been entirely eclipsed by the
war on terror, so too do other ways of telling a cops-and-crime
saga survive in the US.

If, like me, you find the CSI formula not confusing but
certainly as mind-numbing as those network executives once feared
it would be, you could turn to a police show set in Los Angeles,
The Shield (Ten, Wednesdays, 10.30pm).

To watch The Shield is to be reminded of what The
Bill once was and Blue Heelers still sometimes
manages to be, although it is a far, far grittier slice of life
than either of these.

The Shield is not a drama of procedure but of
character; the police in Farmington, the fictional LA neighbourhood
where it is set, do not routinely win their battles with the drug
gangs who lord it over the streets, and many of these cops,
including the protagonist Vic Mackey (Michael Chiklis), are
themselves less than paragons of virtue.

The Shield has acquired some notoriety for its
portrayal of violence and preoccupation with police corruption, but
although it does not shrink from squalor, moral and physical, it
does not endorse the moral compromises made by Mackey and his
colleagues either.

It does, however, accept that their derelictions reflect deeper
injustices in the society of which they are a part.

There is a many-layered politics in The Shield: the
managerial politics of "the Barn" (the converted church that serves
as the police station), the thuggish politics of the gangs, and the
community politics of Farmington, all of which overlap.

And trying to balance all of them, in the fourth series which is
now screening, is the Barn's captain, Monica Rawlings (Glenn
Close).

It is one of Close's strong-woman roles, and shecarries it off
superbly. There is something in a Glenn Close smile that conveys
menace and resolve in equal measure - and in that smile, glimpsed
at least once in each episode, are all the very human
contradictions of The Shield.